Why AGW Is Logically Impossible

From a purely logical point of view, AGW (and especially, catastrophic AGW) can almost certainly be disproved using the argument ad providentiam.

That’s a concept I have mentioned sometimes in the past in some part of the web, not under that name of course. Very briefly, it goes like this: philosophically speaking, an interpretation of the world is fallacious when it implies the existence of divine, or divine-like intervention.

And so for example, AGW is logically fallacious as it has providential undertones. In other words, for (catastrophic) AGW to be upon us right now, something akin to a God or gods (or god-like creatures) has/have to be taking care of us. Because for (catastrophic) AGW to be happening, several amazing coincidences must have recently happened:

Relatively widespread availability of computer power is just enough strong to simulate the right climate projections on a multi-decadal scale

Climate science is developed just beyond the minimal level needed to understand how to simulate the right climate projections on a decadal scale

Novel statistical approaches have been devised just in time, and are correct from the get-go, for Mann’s Hockey Stick to emerge from the jumble of dendro- and other proxy data

Governmental willingness to co-operate together all over the world (after the end of the Cold War) happens just in time for a worldwide problem like AGW to happen

AGW is recognized as an issue just as heavily-populated places such as India and China start getting their living standards on track to reach the Western world’s

Western Governments discover that there’s no money to be made out of making poverty history, just when poverty is discovered to be caused by taxable carbon

Invention of satellites capable of photographing the poles happens just at the moment they start to melt

Data homogenization adjustments are invariably the more negative the older the data

Suddenly, actions previously known to be good are now coincidentally necessary to fight climate change

Climate change materializes as a worldwide emergency to be solved by typically-leftist social order interventions, immediately after the Soviet Union collapses and Communism with it

A great number of scientists of various repute goes ga-ga upon reaching pension age, and speak openly of their skepticism just because they’re too old to understand a thing

AGW mechanisms are such that the vast majority of warming happens in remote, very cold places where there’s a dearth of actual data and people that would notice any change, and where changes are hard to tell anyway as average temps go from hyperfreezing cold to slighly-less-than-hyperfreezing-cold

As the world gets warmer, plenty of Bad Things proliferate whilst plenty of Good Things dwindle in number or occurrence (popular species disappear whilst unpopular ones like jellyfish expand, and so on and so forth)

Just like controlled nuclear fusion, all AGW catastrophes happen to firmly placed decades in the future, often beyond the AGWer’s own lifetime

Recognized scientists that speak against the IPCC dogma are only able to talk trivial, or stupid

Whatever new crisis is said to be in the making (eg the collapse of biodiversity), it will be made worse by AGW

Whatever new crisis is said to be in the making (eg the collapse of biodiversity), it will cause similar Bad Things as those that are consequences of AGW

Islands getting “disappeared” by AGW happen to be the same islands where subsidence and the constant changes in a river’s delta are at play

Ever more sophisticated models for AGW keep confirming what old, less sophisticated models were already showing. At most, the new results are invariably worse than those previously computed

Alone in the realm of physics, the AGW effect acts in the real world exactly as in the laboratory, or with invariably worse consequences, despite the bewildering complexity of Earth’s climate

Despite several lines of evidence in the geological record showing that we are more or less at a relatively high point in global temperatures having come out of an ice age quite recently, all within irregular but similar cycles, present-day warming is of a wholly-different nature

Having been tasked to investigate the science at CRU/UEA in the wake of Climategate, Lord Oxburgh happens to interpret “investigate the science” in a way that excludes any investigation of the science

Having been tasked to investigate CRU/UEA in the wake of Climategate, Sir Muir Russell happens to interpret “investigate” in a way that excludes any investigation that might lead to criminal charges

Sea levels threaten the lifestyles of millions and millions around the world, even if of all the islands monitored by NOAA only 2 out of 13 barely manage to show a sea-level rate of increase at the lower end of the IPCC projections.

In a stupendously cruel twist, a terrifying number of Bad Things that scientists of the 1970s had been expected to happen by now because of global cooling, are now expected by scientists to happen by 2050 because of global warming

Increases in the world’s average temperature cause all sorts of disruptions to poor people, even if nobody dares to suggest that they would benefit from decreases in the world’s average temperature

Having been around for 542 million years, corals are exactly now threatened by changes in the oceans’ temperatures, salinity and pH, suggesting a more-than-remarkable stability of each one of those for a humongous length of time and in the face of massive extinctions, supervolcanic episodes, asteroid strikes, etc etc

Novel discounting approaches have been devised just in time, and are correct from the get-go, for Stern’s Review to demonstrate that it is viable to spend billions if not trillions to combat climate change right now

97% of scientists agree on Anthropogenic Global Warming, a number likely to surpass the figures related to any agreement among evolutionary biologists on how exactly Darwinism works, among physicists on how exactly the Universe works, and among epistemologists on how exactly science works

Having thrown their money left right and center for years, the Koch brother finally manage to manipulate people’s views on a topic, poisoning their minds about AGW with a few million dollars mysteriously more powerful than Gore’s 300M bucks, and the unlimited resources thrown around by Governments the world over to support the concept of catastrophic AGW

Having won an Oscar, a Nobel Prize and innumerable awards, having occupied more or less every audio or video broadcast for years, having had the run of more or less every newspaper for the same length of time, suddenly AGW leaders declare they’re not “great communicators” and blame this for the generally high levels of skepticism

Planet-wide coolng episodes in the historical past have always been local phenomena, or at worst hemispheric.

Local warming episodes in the past, present and future are all and always global phenomena

It’s already possible to identify the climatic change due to 150 years of CO2 emissions, even if no particular climate has much changed during the same period

Having been faithful recorders of temperature variations for hundreds of years, suddenly tree rings start showing the “divergence problem” during the past 50 years

Even if “climate” is a concept valid only on the multi-decadal scale, AGW manifests itself differently according to the year, sometimes with more hurricanes, sometimes with less Arctic sea ice, sometimes with warm summers, and so on and so forth

Every atmospheric phenomenon can be explained by AGW

Scientists all agree that a global cooling trend was undergoing between 1972 and 1975, yet it’s improper to call that a “consensus”, and it’s got nothing to do whatsoever with the present “consensus” on AGW

The AGW consensus has grown during a positive phase of the ENSO index, yet they’ve got nothing to do with each other

It’s not possible to find the remaining $700M that would cancel malaria from the planet, yet it’s realistic to think in a few years hundreds of billions of dollars will exchange hands going from rich to poor countries to lower CO2 emissions and to protect the poor from AGW’s nastier side

In the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1970s The New York Times published articles about melting polar ice scares. This time, however, AGW is involved so it must be true

AGW skepticism can be explained by invoking several psychological processes not far from mental illness. AGW belief is instead the only possible choice for an open and honest mind

Higher-than-average temperatures, easily and obviously explained by referring to weather patterns, are instead the fault of AGW

AGW is a grave threat to humanity, yet it can take the backseat when AGWers have to score their petty points (such as not sharing their data with the “wrong” people) or need to grab all the money they can (such as when journals hide important public policy articles behind paywalls)

Sea-level rates of increase are skyrocketing, yet it is a good investment to buy ocean-view villas

Flooded Roman-times fishtanks are evidence of AGW, whilst dry Roman-times ports are evidence of plate tectonics or local phenomena

Large undersea volcanic eruptions in bowl-shaped Arctic basin have no consequence whatsoever on sea-ice cover on top of them

Research indicates one in 8 decades of global warming will show no warming at all, and that decade just happens to be the one we live in

Truisms are false unless they are peer-reviewed. Conversely, peer-reviewed flawed arguments are true.

Peer-reviewed papers mentioned by the wrong outlets such as the SPPI or Cato Institute automatically lose whatever importance they had

Unique among all sciences, climatology develops yet finds no surprise whatsoever, apart from when it’s worse than we thought

After centuries of failed predictions, all of a sudden scientists are capable to correctly depict the (climate) future

Like every generation before them, contemporary climate researchers claim the world’s weather patterns are changing in an unprecedented way. This time, however, AGW is involved, so it is true

Admittedly, natural variability does change the climate, however it can be distinguished from climate change

AGW is a solid scientific theory demanding for immediate action, even if nobody has figured out what if anything could ever falsify it

AGW is such an important topic, newspapers like “The New York Times” suddenly rediscover how to accept supinely whatever Higher Authorities tell them. Likewise for otherwise-skeptic people such as Phil “The Bad Astronomer” Plait.

Admittedly, each individual item (well, most of them) is not particularly remarkable per-se, and even a selected bunch of them taken together could be explained one way or another, and ultimately, considered as some kind of “lucky chance”. After all, one could argue that Einstein’s relativity is a by-product of Ricci-Curbastro’s tensor calculus, or that tensor calculus appeared just-in-time as it was needed for relativity to be developed. History of science is full of examples like that. It is however of a much taller order to apply that line of reasoning to 30+ separate items.

Furthermore, there are items that defy all possible explanation. Take for example item #3.

Novel statistical approaches have been devised just in time, and are correct from the get-go, for Mann’s Hockey Stick to emerge from the jumble of dendro- and other proxy data

I am referring of course to Michael Mann’s sudden statistical innovations in the field of PCA, all the more miraculous as they appeared literally out of the blue, and quite independently from mainstream statistics (for a discussion on what statisticians think of them, see here).

Yes, some people did manage to invent their own analysis tools. Just think of Newton and calculus. But I very much doubt that Newton’s calculus was seen as a limited tool by fellow mathematicians. And its effects were far-ranging, whilst the only reason Mann’s PCA exist is to allow the Hockey Stick to appear from the data.

The same of course applies to Lord Stern’s discounting rate as per item #37.

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All in all, belief in AGW implies belief in a highly-improbable series of lucky discoveries, developments and various other incidents to happen (or not to happen) just at the right time. That is called “Providence” and it is strong evidence for the existence of a Divine Being. But since such “evidence” is a contradiction in terms, then for catastrophic AGW to be happening right now, that’s a logical impossibility.

There are belief systems where the “gods” are rather meek and don’t do much. In one such society I know of the gods have a lot to do with weather, so we’re all set to test out a climate/weather related idea. In that society if you say “It will rain this afternoon” (and it will, it is a rain forest) not only might it SOUND LIKE you are invoking providence, but you actually are.

Therefor, according to your logic, it will not rain that afternoon, or any afternoon. In the ran forest.

This is in places quite funny, in others quite alarming and in a couple quite bollocks. However, it’s an excellent demonstration of what people fail to notice about climatology.

The overriding simple fact here is that the science is absolutely crap because far too many people start from an answer and work back to a theory, rather than beginning with a hypothesis and attempting to prove it via scientific method. It *might* be the case that we’re responsible for the steady destruction of the Earth’s climate. We *might* be heating it up. We *might* be doing this by releasing CO2. We *might* be doing this via deforestation. Or… we might not. A “model” isn’t a provable hypothesis – it’s a guess, a line of best fit, an extrapolation.

Chaos theory dictates that the complexity of a climate will dictate that ALL such models will be wildly wrong (regardless of what Skeptical Science might say, which was an amusing read, he’s forgotten that the chaos roots from multiple initial conditions rather than just one) – just look at the weather forecast, or the predicted path of a hurricane, for example – those are considerably simpler than climates, which have far more initial conditions. Any reliable model would have to take into account everything that can affect the climate, and right now we don’t have the computing power or the necessary measurements to be able to do that. And we probably never will.

I have thought about this blog on occasion as various things have passed through the news. The terrifying news that methane expulsion from the poles was going to cost $60tn over the next 100 years, shortly followed by the revelation that this had already been disproven and this sort of methane expulsion had been going on for years anyway. And the horrifying and terrible revelation that the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had – who’d have thought it? – actually *increased* the levels of plant life in various places around the globe and was contributing to un-deforestation (whatever that word should be). And it always strikes me that the infinitely complex system in which we live is always going to stick the middle finger up at the climatologists (do *not* call them climate scientists, they’re not doing any real science, they’re more of a religion or a cult) and one of these days they’re going to get something so terribly wrong that they’re going to wipe out a whole country. In the meantime, my fuel bills continue to rise exponentially for no reason other than that someone else believes something which I’m not stupid enough to. If things carry on the way they are I’m going to have to find a country where they simply aren’t bothered. Fuel poverty is already killing way more people in the UK than climate change – thanks very much, the-last-five-governments.

Where do I begin to unravel this non-sense? I agree with the proposition that this posting be considered as a “joke” because, to dispute AGW (I now prefer ..CD for “climate disruption”)… is an act of blind faith today. For a more serious treatment of this subject (and to understand why i am not going to post a long reply), I would invite all agnostic readers to take a look at this post of mine from over a year ago:To all who say AGW is junk science (4 Oct 2011)

“This is not scientific scare-mongering; it is an empirically-based, laboratory-tested and, now, observable fact.

Some of you may demand evidence, but then you do not accept it when it is presented to you: disappearing sea ice, melting permafrost, retreating glaciers, desertification, crop failures, food shortages, water scarcity. ”

To which I can only reply with that age-old scientific axiom “Correlation is not Cause”.

‘Some of us’ do not demand evidence so much as demand that the contention of CACC (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change) be subject to the rigour of data garnered from a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines, disciplines that proceed, not upon the foundation of Computer AlGore-ryhtym-driven fantasies (hockey sticks were, after all, DESIGNED to show up in the selective culling of data) but disciplines that increasingly illustrate the powerful and little understood (thus, at present hopelessly ill-configured in correlative programming attempts) vagaries and variables of an IMMENSE weather system.

Dear gabrielg… It is not possible to explain current events unless you admit that CO2 is the main driver of the accelerating change we are now seeing. Volcanoes, aerosols and the Sun all contribute to complicating the picture (i.e. global dimming), but only anthropogenic CO2 can explain the long-term trend. We are not still emerging from the LIA. Over the last 250 years, human activity has upset a dynamic equilibrium that had maintained relatively stable sea levels and temperatures for about 7000 years (i.e. long enough for agriculture, cities, and modern civilisation to develop). I

f anyone is indulging in wishful thinking it is you – not me. I do not want climate change to be a reality anymore than I want to contemplate my own mortality; but reality does not change just because we may choose to ignore it. Climate change is not a myth invented by some fanciful UN/WMO/IPPC conspiracy – it is a physical reality postulated 150 years ago; re-affirmed 50 years ago; and fingerprinted 24 years ago… Since when all computer model predictions have been exceeded. By this latter point, I mean that positive feedback mechanisms were not included in models – which is why things are now happening faster than predicted (i.e. for the emissions scenario that has proven to be closest to reality).

A world government, having been given absolute power over all aspects of human life, nessissary to combat AGW, will, for the first time in history, be absolutly free of corruption.
A goverment, having been given total worldwide dicatoral powers nessissary to combat AGW, will somehow still be completly controllable by democratic means.
All partsa of science and goverment that now are supporting the policies of AGW have miraculously and immediatly become free of corruption coincident with their support of AGW.
Carbon markets, that have fallen through the floor worldwide, and fallen totally into corruption, theft, and fraud, will suddenly work perfectly this time if implemented here.

Just like controlled nuclear fusion, all AGW catastrophes happen to firmly placed decades in the future, often beyond the AGWer’s own lifetime

Whew! What a relief!

I had feared there really was a drought in the American Southwest, drought in Texas, drought AND floods in Australia, massive flooding in Thailand, huge floods in Pakistan two years in a row, a drought in China, rising sea levels, and changing migratory patterns for dozens of birds and other species. How nice to know it’s all just a bad nightmare.

Right? I mean, it’s not like there really was a Hurricane Katrina whose aftermath destroyed New Orleans, or a Hurricane Ike that took out Galveston again, right?

@Ed: I find it hilarious when uber-warmists like yourself blame every flood, drought, tornado, etc on humanity … as if flooding didn’t happen before we arrived on the scene! The 10 deadliest floods in human history all occurred before 1976:

Just to be clear, we can understood ACC influences in unusual patterns and qualities of things, those changing patterns. For example, the 2004 Hurricane in Brazil was the first ever noted and recorded in that area. Ever. Hurricane Katrina was itself unusual, I recall, the strongest to ever make landfall in that area or something.
“Omnologos” citing an attribution problem is showing one version of the denialist conceptual problem in this issue. The heat-trapping, radiative quality of CO2. That is what those professional scientists at the IPCC are working with. Why pay attention to cause and effect when we’ve got “logical skeptics” essentially doing the oil companies’ bidding?

Yes, I agree, but maybe “highly improbable” would fit better, as the Sun’s behaviour isn’t easy to predict. And remember: 66 x a verification is less than 1 falsification (KR Popper). So even if You are right, you haven’t finally proved it.

Can you, plese, give me the proper sources for Your point 30: “Sea levels threaten the lifestyles of millions and millions around the world, even if of all the islands monitored by NOAA only 2 out of 13 barely manage to show a sea-level rate of increase at the lower end of the IPCC projections”?

I’m just completing a thick book on AGW – interested in reading the introduction?

[…] A recent article by that thorn in the DECC’s side Chris Booker has again asked where the government is headed. Click here to read. Following the logic discussed by one commentator makes a reasonable conclusion. Developers talk about capacity as though it is megawatts on call all the time. Capacity is only the maximum output in perfect, or optimum, wind conditions. The maximum useable “output”will be some twenty per cent below that figure after line losses and voltage regulation. Now the Logic. If the wind does not blow, the capacity is zero. Therefore logically the maximum reliable capacity of any wind farm is ZERO! Now seeing as Mr. Cameron’s choice of Christmas Dinner companions and PR advisors is decidedly suspect, may we advise him to take the advice of the DECC, it’s Secretary of State and it’s Ministers with a great deal of circumspection. After all if Rupert Murdoch can close the News of the World cannot our Prime Minister close the DECC for it’s often dubious behaviour too. And if you question my logic in this jump have a quick look at this link Lord Turnbull Trashes the IPCC Report And while we are about it how about the comments of Maurizio Morabito “Why AGW is logically Impossible” […]

This all rather silly. You could use the same framework to argue that almost anything you wish is a “logical fallacy.” This whole piece speaks more to the author’s inability to comprehend the scientific process in general. I would point you to the Youtube channel of Peter Hadfield (aka potholer54) for some very basic education on how the scientific process works.

I read (most of) the other posts. Rob is dead-on. Your “logical” analysis is simply absurd. You claim all of things “must” happen for AGW to be true, but my eyes glazed over before I found even one that needed to be true for AGW to be real.

You have seriously and systematically conflated our ability to analyze AGW with our ability to cause it.

Maurizio, If your parents had never met , you would never have been born. The same applies to every generation of all your ancestors. Going back millions of years. The chances of that happening, that all your ancestors would reproduce eventually resulting in you must be incredibly small. Can we therefore conclude, by the same logic you employ in the above posting, that Maurizio Morabito is a logical fallacy also?

Ref point #19. Ever more sophisticated models for AGW keep confirming what old, less sophisticated models were already showing. At most, the new results are invariably worse than those previously computed

There’s still hope
–
An article by Samuel Staley
January 11, 2011, 1:44pm

Better Modeling Leads to Less Global Warming
“A newer, more sophisticated climate model has lost more than 25 percent of its predicted warming. The change resulted from a more realistic simulation of the way clouds work, resulting in a major reduction in the model’s “climate sensitivity,” which is the amount of warming predicted for a doubling of the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over what it was prior to the industrial revolution, says Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute.http://reason.org/blog/show/better-modeling-leads-to-less-globa

[…] Through October and November Omnologos created a list of events and circumstances related to climate change and climate science that he considered improbably coincidental, and as such offered it as clear evidence as to Why AGW Is Logically Impossible. […]

Just posted in reply to Greenfyre at his site: let me state something I could be called to account for: I do not believe that climate change is a conspiracy, or a hoax of any sort. I do believe there are way too many people taking advantage of the “climate change” meme for their own earthly goals, sometimes in an organized manner, but that doesn’t make CC or AGW a conspiracy as such.

There are obvious logical flaws in my “impossibility” list but I guess you should rewrite the blog above as it makes no sense to criticize me as a believer in a conspiracy.

It is amazing how the guy manages to miss every possible point every single time. Cervantes would have cried at the chance of meeting a real-life Don Quixote.

I’m a APW skeptic, but I think you should correct your title from from impossible to improbable. Using the word “impossible” in an unfit context makes you (and by extension, the rest of us) seem hyperbolic and shrill.

Re #35: yes, corals as a Class have been around for that long, but all modern corals only evolved 230 million years ago. All the previous groups wend extinct before that; indeed, the two major reef forming groups of the Palaeozoic (rugosans and tabulates) died out around the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction: and event that has strong signatures of greenhouse gas driven global warming. We don’t even know how similar those ancient groups were to modern ones (eg did they have photosymbionts?).

Of course even modern scleractinian corals have have survived two major mass extinctions as a group, but the numbers and diversity were massively impacted by each event (leaving reef gaps lasting many millions of years, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008CorRe..27..459V). And during the warm Cretaceous, reef building corals were largely pushed aside by the rudist bivalves.

So corals have survived, but major environmental changes have had devastating effects on them nonetheless. Therefore your point is highly misleading.

2/ Suddenly reducing a population of species (or class of species) to a small fraction of its original size (even if it does eventually repopulate the planet) is certainly a devastating event.

There have been numerous mass extinctions, that have killed a large amount of the biosphere – are you saying that these weren’t devastating?

examples..
Dinosaurs are still around – they’re called birds now..

By your logic they were certainly not devastated 60 million years ago.

Lookup the Toba catastrophe theory. It estimated that the human species was reduced to 1-10 thousand people. Yet here we are today at almost 7 billion – would you therefore suggest that humanity wasn’t devastated by this eruption?

Congratulations. Nearly half way to starting a thirty years’ war, and maybe ending up with control of Saxony and Sweden. No thanks.
It’s not one of the least of life’s ironies for bookish types like us that , if we’d been involved in the movable type revolution instead of the internet one, we’d have ended up on the side of the line which got to read the Totentanz and the Ship of Fools, while on the “wrong” side of the fence they had translations of Herodotos and Lucian, and Ariosto and Aretino (and Giordano Bruno of course. I think he deserves a thread).

When you are in a greenhouse, do you feel cold or warm? If we put artificially millions of tons of greenhouse gases, the global warm appears, this is simple logic. We are acting as an abrupt impact like a comet or an asteroid, because 1 or 2 centuries are very little time for the dynamics of the climate. Here it is, clear and simple. Not 55 points… This is not a problem for the Earth, however, it will be a problem for our standard of life, but, you know, this is relative… there won’t be blgs and comments… not a real shame 😉

I think CO2 is the last of our troubles. I think cattle all around the world are emitting a lot of HC4 in the atmosfere, I think that the sequestration of the carbon by the rain forests is artifically slowing down, and this is the contrary of the natural feedback, an increase of CO2 naturally would boost the green, but we need soil for cattle, A LOT of soil, look with google maps over the amazon or another rain forest as you like, this is not difficult, a couple of click, look at the mess. We are destroying the forests, we are bringing back in the atmosphere the carbon sequestrated in millions of years, we’re injecting methane in the atmosfere, we’re destroying the soil with intensive agricolture (the soil needs centuries for a natural recovery, if we’re lucky) all around the world and the world population is increasing. And we really don’t know what is going to appen when millions of tons of methane will be emitted by the territories in the north, when the permafrost will melt down. And the pollution of the oceans with metals? Inuit are dieing now for lead and mercury in the fish, we are the next. There are a lot of things… It is not simple… The simple thing is: the natural world is being disturbed by human activities, in a degree never seen before.

My attitude? I’ve only put a couple of facts. If data are too bad or too scary, it’s better not to tell the people. Is this your thought? Even worse, tell the people global warming is not going to happen?
Yes, some predictions by environmentalists have proved incorrect in the past … so what? Even Einstein was wrong with MC, but I don’t blame him. This is science, theories are all wrong, but we’re sending rockets in space (except for the Discovery 😉 Stay up, don’t dispair Maurizio!

Paolo – data is never “scary”. It’s our interpretation that might (or might not) be “scary”. In any case, I didn’t say that people should be kept in the dark. What I have been saying for several years, is that if somebody is convinced somethings bad is going to befall upon us, this somebody has the duty of making at least an effort to steer the situation towards a better outcome.

Now, as it is known that people refuse to listen when told there’s no (or little) hope, I presume it makes little sense to say there’s no (or little) hope. The direr the situation, the better the effort should be to communicate it in a way that will make a positive difference.

Paolo:
It depends on where the Greenhouse is. In the desert they have Greenhouses that restrict by inducing cool air through evaporation cooling. Greenhouses are climate controlled enclosures meant to maintain a certain temperature range and humidity for maximum growing conditions.
By the way CO2 is introduced to increase the concentration to over 1000ppm in a greenhouse to increase growth.

Paolo:
The current concentration of ruminants is below long time average so their presence is an imaginary problem. Yes Most were wiped out by humans. That is why humans had to domesticate cattle for food. Before they were used for beasts of burden and wildlife were used for food.

[…] governance of climategate and how to avoid transparency, accountability and responsibility ; The unaccountable governance of global warming and how it defies reality ; The governance of rent seeking bureacrats and another $15 billion ; The real figures that […]

I disagree with items 1, 2, 3 and 7. It would not be a coincidence that computers, climate science, statistics and satellites had emerged at about the same time as large-scale emission of CO2, as these are all products of the same cause, i.e. the appearance of a fossil-fuel based technological civilisation.

Hello Stephen and thank you both for visiting and for your comment, that allows me to dwell into two interesting aspects of the list.

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Admittedly, each individual item (well, most of them) is not particularly remarkable per-se, and even a selected bunch of them taken together could be explained one way or another, and ultimately, considered as some kind of “lucky chance”.

After all, one could argue that Einstein’s relativity is a by-product of Ricci-Curbastro’s tensor calculus, or that tensor calculus appeared just-in-time as needed for relativity to be developed. History of science is full of examples like that.

It is however of a much taller order to apply that line of reasoning to 29 separate items or more.

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Furthermore, there are items that defy all possible explanation. Take for example item #3.

Novel statistical approaches devised just in time, and correct from the get-go, for Mann’s Hockey Stick to emerge from the jumble of dendro- and other proxy data

I am referring of course to Michael Mann’s sudden statistical innovations in the field of PCA, all the more miraculous as they appeared literally out of the blue, and quite independently from mainstream statistics (for a discussion on what statisticians think of them, see here).

Yes, some people did manage to invent their own analysis tools. Just think of Newton and calculus. But I very much doubt that Newton’s calculus was seen as a limited tool by fellow mathematicians. And its effects were far-ranging, whilst the only reason Mann’s PCA exist is to allow the Hockey Stick to appear from the data.

If it was not for all the research there would be no global warming to be concerned about. Weather patterns are still following historical patterns that have little changed throughout the existence of the earth. The deviations from natural patterns have been forced by extreme events.

AGW is also logically impossible because we only produce 3-4% of CO2. CO2 is also not likely to be the main culprit with the vast powers of nature and physics in play.

Also consider that there is a problem with going by averages; a day that has a temp that hovers at 71 degrees all day will have a higher average than a day with a high of 80 and a low of 60.

Logically, the planet cannot overheat with convection currents continually at work; heat rises, and air cooled in the upper atmosphere sinks, (regardless of how much CO2 is in it). Also, the Southern Hemisphere and Northern Hemisphere have opposing seasons; the planet is so well balanced, it’s frightening:)

While very funny I’m not sure that all these are arguments for the existence of a Divine Being. Surely those that quality are only those where “lucky discoveries and developments…happen just at the right time”.

That would be your 1 to 5 and 7, for example. But isn’t 12 an argument against Providence? If God wanted us to discover AGW would he make it happen in remote places, and would be make it so implausible when investigated?

Which brings you back to the idea that you can only believe if you have faith. Where have I heard that before?

J4R – no, I am not in a quest to demonstrate the Divinity either. My list just shows the extreme lengths that contemporary AGW belief is ready to climb, rather than acknowledging the obvious. For example, what is more probable…large temperature increases in the middle of Siberia or the Arctic Ocean, far away from people and thermometers OR some misunderstanding on how to compute those temperatures?

The presence of “amazing coincidences” that would hardly be compatible with Superior Beings emanating towards us their Providential Help, is actually a reinforcement of the absurdity of the situation.

A close colleague of mine, sisterdingo, has just added another one (plus a plug for this blog) in a comment athttp://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/02/channel-4-green-documentary
I hate to be pedantic, but this is not an example of a logical impossibility, merely something which is highly unlikely to occur in the real world.
An example of a logical impossibility would be climate change being identical in meaning with global warmig, since this would imply that it was also identical with global cooling, and A=B > not (A = notB) (I hope I’ve got that right).

Sisterdingo, … You appear to be obsessing about the bellend [sic] of the curve.

No, it’s just I’m as fascinated as everyone else by the hold that graphs have over our imagination.
Maurizio athttp://omniclimate.wordpress.com/why-agw-is-logically-impossible/
has a marvellous list of amazing coincidences which characterise the global warming story, to which one could add: the fact that graphic representations of the past, present and future have come to dominate our imaginations at precisely the moment that software arrived capable of turning facts into spaghetti at the touch of a button.